If you attended the World Association of Newspapers meeting in Madrid you might be leaving with the idea that the future of newspapers is online. Dramatic drops in print circulation across the board to newspapers over the past few years should come to no suprise to veterans of the online publishing industry.

The WSJ, The Guardian, and other newspapers figured this out early on. The sad truth for many other newspapers is that it may be too late to jump aboard.

…the Internet arm of El Mundo (Elmundo.es), Spain’s second-best selling daily in print, has the highest readership of all online European papers with 750,000 visitors a day, and is the most read title in the Spanish-speaking world. A digital strategy dating back nearly 10 years has made the site “very profitable” since 2003, with a profit of 1.3 million euros (1.5 million dollars) in 2004, according to Elmundo.es director of development Emilio Plana Hidalgo.